Ben Harris is the chief executive and co-founder of Drop, a connected kitchen scale with interactive recipe platform.
An industrial designer and graduate of London’s Brunel University, he previously established Dublin product design consultancy White Zebra Studios, which was honoured by the Institute of Designers Ireland with two awards in its very first year.
He co-founded Drop in 2012 along with Jonny McCauley, Jack Phelan and Tim Redfern.
The company’s kitchen scale wirelessly connects to the iPad app to offer features, such as rescaling quantities and common substitutions, with just a tap.
After graduating from PCH's inaugural Highway1 programme (a hardware accelerator based in San Francisco), the Drop connected kitchen scale and recipe app were launched to the public in February 2014 at the Launch Festival in San Francisco (where Fitbit and Dropbox launched in previous years) and won the "best consumer product" award.
Following a successful pre-order campaign in the summer of 2014, the connected kitchen scale went on sale in every Apple Store in America, Canada and the UK and has since expanded to Target in the US, Lakeland in the UK and as far as Apple stores in Australia and New Zealand.
The business has headquarters in Dublin 8 and a satellite office in San Francisco.
What vision/lightbulb moment prompted you to start up in business? We saw the array of connected products being released across the home and felt the kitchen was really underserved.
We also saw that recipes haven’t changed in a thousand years; a block of text, a list of ingredients and an image, but that 50 per cent of iPads were being used in the kitchen and that recipes were the third most-shared content online. With these things in mind, we decided to make our interactive recipe platform.
Describe your business model: There are three phases to our business model. The first being to develop beautifully designed hardware products that people will welcome into their kitchen.
The next step is to integrate Drop technology with kitchen appliance manufacturers and, finally, build a connected social, interactive recipe operating system for the whole kitchen. What is your greatest business achievement to date? We went from a team of five, with a 3D printed prototype, a rough mock of an app and not enough money to pay our WiFi bill in March 2014, to having a product on the shelves of every Apple Store in the US, Canada and the UK, just shy of $1 million in revenue, $2 million in funding, a team of 12 people (and a new office) by December in the same year.
How will your market look in three years? The most shared content on Pinterest right now is recipes (third most online), YouTube food channel subscriptions are going up 250 per cent year on year, half of all iPads are being used in the kitchen, all major kitchen appliance manufacturers have "connected" programs in place.
The race to the smart kitchen has begun.
In three years it will be ubiquitous, in five years we’ll all be wondering how anyone lived without it.
What were the best & the worst pieces of advice you received when starting out? Best: "You do the hard stuff really well and struggle with the day-to-day stuff, get someone who can do a great job of the day-to-day stuff" – that's when we hired our chief operating officer. Worst: "Lose the beards, investors don't like beards."
